None of these actually matter much, they just shift around the methods that milkers will use but with automation, vote selling, reward-sharing schemes, etc. this was always going to turn out badly.

Well, that's my point. It turned out badly because those protocol changes made it much easier and much more lucrative for the "milkers."

Delegation made it possible for non-invested users to rent stake and run vote-selling bots practically risk- and accountability-free. It also allowed entities like STINC and users like Freedom/Pumpkin to gift or rent out their previously and mostly unused influence, further diluting all other stakeholder influence. I think you're aware of how that distorts and influences markets and development in a variety of ways.

(I say "risk-free" because promising liquid payments for renting SP is a stakeholder's dream. You can keep your stake powered up and still cash out the rewards earned from it...with no actual "contributing" effort to the blockchain/content required. It's essentially a circumvention of DPoS.)

Linear rewards made it possible to precisely calculate vote values and offer them for sale at a "fair market value." It also makes "guaranteed ROI" possible - which further allows for easy automation.

The 10-vote target made that delegated voting power and vote value 4x more valuable for "promoting" content. It allows bid bots to push the poor content to the top and mostly out-compete "organic" curation.

So I do think these protocols matter...a lot. Yes, we had other issues of buying/selling votes before, but not nearly at this current scale and with this much visibility. This bold move of "bringing it out of the shadows" has been a disaster. Not only is it horrible for perception, but it doesn't accurately depict the type or the amount of backroom trading that may have taken place previously - and that we were unaware of - which was likely relatively minimal.

Instead of cleaning things up via transparency, it made things actually appear exponentially filthier.

Instead of giving more influence to less-invested users, it apparently has made those users see the game as even more rigged.

Instead of attracting, retaining, and cultivating more active users, we simply have more former users going off and creating their own chains, using other chains instead, and/or spreading the word about how awful Steem has become. And we thought users didn't like Steem before the 2017 hard forks. Even the people still here can barely stand the place.

I get what you're saying, but if we really want to fix the economic protocols/incentives, we can't continue ignoring the protocol changes that completely broke the system and what little social atmosphere we had prior to those changes.

Also - this is a perfect example of why multiple large code changes shouldn't be made in one fork. And a great example of why we should be able to evaluate new behavior and revert back to previous protocols when things break or don't work as planned.